Where The Hell Were You?

As you know I’ve been out of touch for a while because I got to go to Europe for the first time ever! On the first I flew from Seattle to Reykjavik (really Keflavik as that’s where the airport is) and began my first experience with jet lag. Oh my god it’s awful! The first day was sitting until near sleep, then walking until sore feet and shoulders forced a break, rinse, repeat.

Iceland is beautiful. It’s rugged, mostly mossy, cold rocks, but warm when the sun is out. While the city of Reykjavik is interesting and the Viking history present at museums and in the shops was interesting, the true charisma rises in plumes from the volcanic activity and the natural wonders it leaves in its wake. Geysers and hotspots are everywhere, used not only to attract visitors by their magnificence but also to provide nearly unending energy. All 220,000 residents of Reykjavik (2/3 of Iceland’s total population) get their hot water directly from a nearby hot spring and, while you wouldn’t want to drink it, it’s used to heat homes, generate electricity, and fill the hot tubs at the local public pool. Even the sidewalks and the roads are heated in Iceland!

The Blue Lagoon is indeed very blue and the complementary silica mud facial treatment is fun both to apply and rinse off (and throw at each other), but as with other well known attractions it quickly fills with other travelers and loses its charm. Ditto with the geothermal activity at Geysir (GAY-zer), the tectonic rift at the Golden Circle, and Gulfoss, Iceland’s largest waterfall. Of course, with a car instead of on a bus tour I’m sure avoiding fellow tourists would be easier but renting a car on Iceland is extremely expensive so I decided against it. That was a mistake. Being able to see some of these magnificent natural wonders when no other people are around gives them a sense of dignity and power that diminishes in direct proportion to the number of people you bump shoulders with on the way.

My favorite parts were walking through an ancient cemetery all alone on a quiet, cold morning, drinking too much with the locals late on a Monday night, the fabulous pastry shop that opens at six every morning, and my two afternoons at the public pool surrounded by locals, chatting in the hot tub and sweating it out in the steam room.

If I were to go back to Iceland, I would rent a car or a camper van and drive around, trying to avoid other tourists. I realize the irony of being a tourist and trying to avoid other tourists but with enough of them present the travel loses its impact, I think. I would bring a sweater as well as a raincoat, and I would spend an hour or so every single day at the local public pool. Also I would try the puffin. I tried the dried fish with butter. It was ok. I watched a girl from California try the fermented shark. It didn’t look ok so I opted out, haha. I did, however, explain to her exactly why it tasted like ammonia. She took it surprisingly well.

After Iceland it was Scotland. From the nice man at the airport to the friendly drunks at the bar every. Single. Person. In Scotland is friendly as shit. Even the customs agent joked about trains in Scotland and this was after a ridiculously slow line so I can’t imagine he had a articulately good reason to be cheerful, he just was.

After the train from Glasgow to Edinburgh the first order of business was to meet up with my friend and photographer Alex. She only had a few days left before coming back to Seattle so we made the best of it with street food, cheap drinks, and a late night snack adventure. At the convenience stores we found soft sandwiches, cheap wine, and the scotch version of Red Bull. It’s called IrnBru (iron brew) and tastes like a cross between bubblegum and skittles. It’s really weird but has tons of caffeine so it was the preferred alternative to the instant coffee which seems to fill every shelf in the UK. They may take their tea seriously but it wasn’t until a Bombay restaurant in London that I found good espresso again.

Edinburgh Castle is huge and impressive, seated atop an ancient volcanic plug. The rest of the city is below it, the skyline a jumble of elegant carvings, jagged spires, green copper domes, and a smattering of boring, official looking buildings. I spent nearly two hours in the war museum, learning about the history of Scotland’s fighting men and neighborly conflicts. There is a large church near the top of the ancient volcanic plug on which the castle sits. After World War One it was repurposed into a large, jagged war memorial. It served its somber purpose with methodical solemnity, lit by thin light filtering through military themed stained glass, painstaking statuary suspended from high vaulted ceilings, Heartfelt words from a nation to its heroes, and book after book after book of names.

A short wander from the castle is a small pub called the Bow Bar. It’s the only place I patronized three separate times on the trip. First serendipity; a sign outside for ‘meat pies; 3 pounds, noon-3” and a line of taps for local ales sounded nice and cheap, important after Iceland which is decidedly not. We got two meat pies: one haggis with chili, one chicken with gravy, both delicious. The second visit was for whiskey; the bartenders there are well known for their knowledge and good humor. An hour or so and a few wee drams later I learned to love Edinburgh gin and that a Skapa distillery tour was on the horizon. That last trip to the Bow Bar was for more haggis pie. Haggis is delicious and of all the haggis so far tasted, this was the best. It was the last day, a little gray, and one more visit seemed the perfect way to cap off the week and prepare for the very long journey to Orkney.

After Edinburgh was the small town of Kirkwall on Orkney, the largest in a series of small islands off the Northern end of Scotland and home of the highland Park Scotch Whiskey Distillery. It took a 7 hour ferry ride from Aberdeen (a further four hours by train from Edinburgh) to reach and thank God our host came to the Ferry terminal because there’s not a lot of public transit in the area. The ferry arrived late at night so it wasn’t until the morning that we got a good look at the town. The weather continued to inexplicably bless with blue skies and surprising warmth as we explored the small town, the local Kirk (church), and the ruin of an ancient bishop’s palace.

The food in a small town is always going to be a bit less than the food in a major city. A bacon sandwich is literally mayo and thick bacon between grocery store bread. No lettuce, not toasted, no ciabatta or anything, just soft bread and hard bacon. All the coffee is instant coffee; the best cup of coffee I got was in a bar that happened to have an espresso machine. I got a ‘mocha’ which was just a double espresso, steamed milk, and hot cocoa mix Served with an odd look by the gruff barman.

But of course, you don’t go to Kirkwall for the food. The Skapa whiskey distillery is also on Orkney and the tour was fabulous. The woman’s thick Orcadian accent and verbal tic was endearing and the information was new to me. The smells, oh man the aroma of malted barley, sweet sharp spirit, rich yeast, and mellowing barrels will stay with me for years to come (or at least as long as the bottles we bought last us). I wrote quite a few words on the whiskey tour but I’ll save that to craft into a mental picture worthy of the tour.

After a late night of drinking, two locals offered to spend their Saturday driving around the island showing off their local knowledge. Maes Howe, Skara Brae, the Standing Stones of Stennes, and the Ring of Brodgur all impressed us one by one by their age, size, ingenuity, and solemnity. These structures were Predecessors of the Pyramids and the Great Wall of China, among other things, and the off-season timing plus personal guided tour just made it that much more impressive.

I did have to giggle at the sheep. They’re everywhere, including grazing at the foot of a twenty foot tall rock stuck in the ground! The juxtaposition of a scruffy ram and an ancient work of passion and religion got me.

Maes Howe is an ancient grave that was broken into and graffitied by vikings on the war path. It’s about what you would expect: “Olga was here” “I had sex” “These runes were written by the greatest rune writer ever” and “Helga is beautiful” next to a picture of a rabid dog. It’s interesting to see that humans are pretty much the same across time and culture, haha, but more on that later.

The Stones of Stennes are tall standing stones, three, arranged in a semicircle around a hearth and two smaller stones. At midwinter, if you stand with your back to the tallest stone and look across the circle over the hearth, the sun shines from behind you, over the hearth, between the two smaller stones, and into the mouth of the entry to Maes Howe all the way down the 30 foot tunnel to the back of the tomb. The skill needed for that, taking into consideration the lack of modern technology, is absolutely stunning.

The Ring of Brodgur is a Henge like Stonehenge except instead of surrounded by a fence and only a few yards from a major motorway it’s truly in the middle of nowhere and you can walk up and touch the stones if you wish.

Skara Brae is by far the most famous Neolithic site on Orkney. It’s a small village made of stone that was buried by a sandstorm simply ages ago, then uncovered by another storm in the late 1800’s (I think). It’s in great shape with even tools, toys, and trinkets left intact and in their original place. It’s as if Pompei were sand instead of ash turned to rock. Again, we had it all to ourselves. Actually, it wasn’t even open but we walked down the beach and snuck in since no one was around. Totally worth it.

We ended the day at a fish and chip truck in Stromness, a viking town on the other side of the island, and had some of the most delicious, amazing fried fish and sausage patties I’ve ever had. Seriously, you wouldn’t believe it until you tasted it. That day, including staying out drinking too late the night before, being hungover until noon, and driving and walking by turns across the Scottish Islands was one of the most perfect days of the whole trip. Of the couple who drove us around, she was from Orkney but he was from another island so she knew all this lore and history and was able to share it with not only these strangers but her beloved. I remarked, as I had been reminded of showing people around my familiar places, that sometimes it helps you appreciate what you have to show it to those who don’t have it. She agreed and thanked us for helping create a pleasant and relaxed day outside, appreciating their home instead of slouched on the couch watching bad movies all day. Simply good.

After Orkney was London. We did the touristy things; I saw a play at Shakespear’s Globe, took selfies in front of Big Ben, ate Indian food, walked along the Queen’s walk, saw Buckingham Palace, went to a local farmer’s market, stopped in at the pub, and mostly just passed the time. There was too much time for it to be just a stopover, not enough time to really sink into anything so instead of trying to do everything and see everyone we just chilled. I did find a book I’ve been looking for for a very long time. You’ll notice if you’ve come to see me that the top shelf on my bookshelf has only one author on it. David Eddings wrote the books of my childhood and I’ve collected and lost the series once already. At a second hand store on Bainbridge several years ago, I found three of his books with the original eighties cover art and snapped them up. At a pop up used ‘book store’ under the Waterloo Bridge I found a fourth. For three pounds sterling I got a book I never thought I would have. I’m sure the rest of them are out there but to have fount it then and there was something I’ll never forget.

After London was Paris, or more accurately Palaissou, a small town 20 km south of Paris. As you may know, my partner traveled some years ago, long before we knew each other. One young woman he met in Tunisia made a particular impression on him, and he on her. They wrote letters and emails, then found Facebook and have kept in touch all this time. When she heard of our trip she immediately offered her hospitality. She met us at the train station (though we should have simply taken the local train, it would have been faster) and drove us to her home where we met her husband and two beautiful children.

Our hostess made us food, oh my God the food! Raclette is basically cheese melted on top of things. Potatoes, bread, more cheese, whatever, just eat it! Finish with a bottle of wine and some Tunisian digestive shared around over a word association card game and you have the perfect French evening. As a tribute to her heritage she made authentic Tunisian couscous and lots of it! She even threw a little cocktail party for us. There were only two guests but we six stood around out on the small back lawn to tell naughty jokes, make fun of the nosy neighbor, drink pomplamouse cidre (grapefruit flavored hard Apple cider), and eat the assortment of snack our hostess provided.

It was a chunk of toasted baguette with cultured butter and coffee for breakfast every day and lunch was more often than not assorte plat du fromage et une pichet rose (assorted plate of cheese and a half bottle of pink wine). In between we went to the cemetery, the Louvre, the café, the Eiffel Tower, and the Basilica of the Sacred Heart (Sacre-Coeur).

The Louve was amazing and I will probably also reserve my gushing about it for it’s own post. There was simply so much beauty and passion there it deserves designated time and place.

Leaving was hard but by the end of the trip it was time to come home. A short flight from Paris to Glasgow, an overnight rest, and finally a long pair of flights to and from Reykjavik (that was the layover option for Iceland Air). I’ve never been so happy to see a Link Light Rail car in my life. Even knowing there was another hour before home, I knew it was the last leg and that in itself was a huge relief.

My first glimpse of home was, not unsettling, not odd, just unfamiliar, as if it was yet another stop on a long journey. I suppose it was, but it didn’t quite feel like coming home until a few hours later, after a long hot bath and clean sheets did I finally feel: Home.

As I look back and retell stories one by one I begin to process them and look inward to find new thoughts and habits. My sleeping and eating habits have changed, for now at least, in a good way. I was concerned I had lost my drive but here I am, writing away, already deep into the day to day business, activism, and social interaction I missed so much. This trip has done me good and I think that the more time goes by, the better it will be for me. Experts say spending money on experiences is better than spending it on items. While there are still things I’d like to buy, I guarantee I got more out of this trip than I would have out of a new car, new gadget, or even new books.

Thank you. This trip has changed my life and without your assistance, without your encouragement, without your boundary keeping, emotionally fulfilling, financially meaningful, pleasurable company I would not have been able to do it. To you I dedicate this post and all the others that come from the sweet fermentation of my mind and this experience.

Holy Shit! I went to Europe! Finally! 😀

The Rights and Wrongs of Prostitution: An Essay by Julia O’connel Davidson, reproduced in full without permission

This essay was originally published in a collection titled Hypatia in 2002. I stumbled across it while checking Google search terms and read a satisfyingly balanced, well researched essay on some of the issues facing prostitution and some of the ethical theories surrounding sex work. As I read it, I found it beautifully devoid of polarizing language and, though my experience and information doesn’t always agree with her research, I happily defer to such a deeply researched and even handed analysis. I don’t agree with everything she writes but I do agree with treating the concerns regarding sex work with respect and care. This is a very long article so you’ll want some time if you want to read the entire thing.

I enjoyed it because I often find myself arguing against both sides on an issue. I like that the author doesn’t take a firm stand and instead outlines the arguments and issues with some of the primary sexual/moral arguments for and against sex work, prostitution in particular. The movement has moved toward a harm reduction/human rights argument and away from a completely unwind able moral argument but seeing this, originally published almost 15 years ago, was refreshingly multidimensional and spoke to my own sense of moral ambiguity and moderation.

I have not added any commentary within the body of the text, only edited out some hyphens and added some space for readability. Enjoy!

The Rights and Wrongs of Prostitution
JULIA O’CONNELL DAVIDSON

This essay critically explores contemporary Euro-American feminist debate on prostitution. It argues that to develop analyses relevant to the experience of more than just a small minority of “First World” women, those who are concerned with prostitution as a form of work need to look beyond liberal discourse on property and contractual consent for ways of conceptualizing the rights and wrongs of “sex work.”

**

Feminists are deeply divided on the issue of prostitution, and debate between what might loosely be termed the “sex work” and the “abolitionist” lobbies is often both heated and bitter. This can be disconcerting for those like me who find themselves in sympathy with elements of both “sides” of the debate and yet also feel it is the wrong debate to be having about prostitution. My own research on prostitution over the past eight years has involved ethnographic and interview work with prostitutes, third-party organizers of prostitution, and clients in both affluent and poor countries (O’Connell Davidson 1998). In all the countries where I have conducted research, female prostitutes are legally and socially constructed as a separate class of persons, and as such are subjected (to varying degrees) to a range of civil and human rights abuses. I am in complete sympathy with “sex work” feminists’ calls for prostitutes to be accorded the same legal and political rights and protections as their fellow citizens. I also agree that the vast majority of those who enter prostitution without being coerced into it by a third party do so for economic reasons, and that prostitution therefore represents a form of work. At the same time, however, none of the data from my research have made me want to celebrate the existence of a market for commoditized sex; rather, the reverse (see O’Connell Davidson 2001; O’Connell Davidson and Sánchez Taylor 1999). In this sense, I am in sympathy with the feminist abolitionist case.

This essay argues that what is wrong with much contemporary Euro-American feminist debate on prostitution is that it disallows the possibility of supporting the rights of those who work in prostitution as workers, but remains critical of the social and political inequalities that underpin market relations in general, and prostitution in particular.

Prostitution and Property in the Person

There is a longstanding tension within liberal political thought regarding the relationship between the body, property, and labor. John Locke is famous for this dictum: “Every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has any right to but himself. The labor of his body, and the work of his hands, we many say, are properly his” (1993, 274). This dictum allows for the commodification of a person’s bodily capacity to labor. Yet as Bridget Anderson notes, because he viewed the body as God-given and sacred, Locke also considered that “a man does not stand in the same relation to his body as he does to any other type of property. . . . So a man does not have the right to kill himself, or put himself into slavery, because he is the work of God” (2000, 3).

The liberal concept of property in the person thus leaves open certain questions about what can, and cannot, properly be commodified and contractually exchanged across a market. In this sense, it appears to have set the agenda for much contemporary Euro-American feminist debate on prostitution. For instance, do the body’s sexual capacities constitute property in the person or is it impossible to detach sex from personhood without moral harm? Does prostitution law violate the prostitute’s natural right to engage in voluntary transfers of her rightful property, or does the prostitution contract itself violate her natural right to dignity? (See, for example, Pateman 1988; Barry 1995; Jeffreys 1997; Chapkis 1997.)

Marxist thinkers view liberal discourse on property, labor, contractual consent, and freedom as a series of fictions that serve to conceal or naturalize huge asymmetries of economic, social, and political power. Their arguments suggest that a person’s labor (whether sexual, emotional, mental, or manual) is, in Braverman’s words, “like all life processes and bodily functions . . . an inalienable property of the human individual.” Because it cannot be separated from the person of the laborer, it is not labor that is exchanged, sold or surrendered across a market. What workers sell, and what employers buy “is not an agreed amount of labor, but the power to labor over an agreed period of time” (1974, 54). Since property in the person cannot be separated from the person, the wage labor contract actually involves a transfer of powers of command over the person. In exchange for x amount of money, the employer gets the right to direct the worker to perform particular tasks, or to think about particular problems, or provide particular forms of service to customers.

Likewise, sex or sexual labor is not exchanged in the prostitution contract. Rather, the client parts with money and/or other material benefits in order to secure powers over the prostitute’s person that he (or more rarely she) could not otherwise exercise. He pays in order that he may direct the prostitute to make body orifices available to him, to smile, dance, or dress up for him, to whip, spank, urinate upon, massage, or masturbate him, to submit to being urinated upon, shackled, or beaten by him, or otherwise act to meet his desires (O’Connell Davidson 1998). It is not that the prostitution contract allows the client to buy the person of the prostitute while the employment contract merely allows the employer to buy the worker’s fully alienable labor power. Both contracts transfer powers of command from seller to buyer (the extent of those powers and the terms of the transfer being the subject of the contract), and so require the seller to temporarily surrender or suspend aspects of her will.

Liberal theorists generally regard the invasion of an individual’s will to be a heinous violation of fundamental human rights, and take a dim view of pre- capitalist and “traditional” social formations within which dominant groups exercised personalistic power to force their subordinates to do their bidding. But because market relations are imagined to involve the exercise of power over commodities rather than persons, and because employers do not usually use personalistic power to force workers to surrender their “property,” the wage labor contract can be presented as an equivalent, mutual, and voluntary exchange. Money, the universal medium for the expression of the exchange values of commodities, is exchanged for the “commodity” of labor power. In capitalist liberal democracies, formal rights of equal participation in the process of commodity exchange are interpreted as a form of freedom for capitalist and worker alike, even though it is through this very process of exchange that the political and economic dominance of the capitalist class is maintained and reproduced. The beauty of the concept of property in the person, then, is that it conceals the relations of power and dependence that exist between those who pay others to do their will, and those who get paid to surrender their own will and do someone else’s bidding.

For anyone who is remotely swayed by this critique, questions about whether or not sex can be commercialized in the same way as labor are the wrong questions to ask about rights. To paraphrase Anatole France, granting rich and poor, men and women, white and black, “First World” and “Third World,” an equal right to engage in prostitution under the bridges of Paris is hardly to strike a blow for human equality or freedom. And yet feminists who discuss prostitutes’ rights to freely alienate their sexual labor certainly wish to promote greater equality and freedom. Indeed, they arrive at their position out of a concern to challenge the very serious civil and human rights violations that have historically been and still are routinely faced by women prostitutes all over the world (documented in, for example, Walkowitz 1980; Alexander 1997; Cabezas 1999; Uddin et al. 2001).

“Sex work” feminists note that these violations are linked to the legal and social construction of women prostitutes as sexual deviants, rather than as workers, and to counter this, they emphasize the continuities between prostitution and other forms of wage labor. From here, it would seem a straightforward matter to move to a critical analysis of the class, gender, race, and global power relations that underpin the contemporary sex industry. But instead, “sex work” feminists often take a rather different turn, and one that is rarely made by those concerned with the rights of workers in other sectors. Having discussed ways in which the market for commodified sex is shaped by global and/or gender inequalities, some analysts move to talk about the selling of sexual labor as though it can represent a form of resistance to those inequalities (see, for example, Bell 1994; Kempadoo and Doezema 1998; Nagel 1997). This is not a leap that directly follows from the proposition that prostitution is a form of labor. Few would, for example, describe the sweatshop worker as “challenging” poverty by stitching garments, the airline flight attendant as “defying” sexism by smilingly serving drinks, or the black child selling shoeshine service in the Caribbean as “resisting” racism by polishing the shoes of white tourists. What makes prostitution different? The answer, I think, has to do with the vexed relationship between sex and selfhood.

Sex and Selfhood Revisited

“What is wrong with prostitution?” Carole Pateman asks, and answers that for the client to buy mastery of an objectified female body, the prostitute must sell herself in a very different and much more real sense than that which is required by any other occupation (1988, 207). This damages the prostitute. To contract out sexual use of the body requires the woman to sever the integrity of body and self, something that carries grave psychological consequences (see, for example, Jeffreys 1997 and Barry 1995). Critiquing such analyses, many “sex work” feminists point to similarities between prostitution and other personal service occupations, arguing that prostitution is better understood as involving a form of emotional labor. Such labor is not always or necessarily harmful to the worker. Wendy Chapkis (1997), for example, notes that while the flight attendants in Arlie Hochschild’s 1983 classic study of emotional labor often believed that performing emotion work had changed them in some way, they “most often described that transformation as a positive one, of gaining greater control.” In the same way, Chapkis argues, sex workers can experience “the ability to summon and contain emotion within the commercial transaction . . . as a useful tool in boundary maintenance rather than as a loss of self” (1997, 75). If sex and emotion are “stripped of their presumed unique relationship to nature and the self, it no longer automatically follows that their alienation or commodification is simply and necessarily destructive” (Chapkis 1997, 76).

Chapkis then moves on to observe that in some settings, emotion work is “socially rewarded and personally gratifying,” and yet, “the respect given to emotional labor in the theatre, a psychotherapist’s office, or a day care center rarely extends to the brothel” (1997, 79). Picking up on Hochschild’s argument that a lack of control over the terms and conditions of employment intensifies the human costs of performing emotional labor, Chapkis concludes that it is not the commodification of emotion per se that is problematic in sex work; rather: “mundane concerns like status differences between worker and client, employee/employer relations and negative cultural attitudes toward the work performed, may be at the root of the distress and damage experienced by some workers. This is less grand, less poetic, than the image of a soul in necessary and mortal danger through the commodification of its most intimate aspects. Such a formulation, however, has the advantage of pointing critics in the direction of practical interventions such as workplace organizing and broader political campaigns to increase the status and respect accorded to those performing the labor” (1997, 82).

It strikes me that this formulation also has advantages for anyone who wants to pay for sexual experience but still retain their feminist credentials (it pro- vides a blueprint for how to be a “good” and “responsible” client, prostitution’s equivalent of a “green consumer”), and that this is surely significant for Chapkis, who opens the final chapter of her book by saying, “After years of research- ing the subject of sex for money, I decided to finally have some” (1997, 215).1 Chapkis’s identification with the wish to consume commercial sex helps to explain why, unlike Hochschild, she pays little attention to “the human cost of becoming an ‘instrument of labor’” (Hochschild 1983, 3), or to questions about the exploitative and alienating nature of the capitalist labor process, and does not really develop a critique of commercialism in relation to prostitution. Nor does Chapkis’s analysis of prostitution refer to broader debates on class or labor movements, despite the mention of employment relations and workplace organizing in the passage quoted above.

So whilst Chapkis’s Live Sex Acts provides a detailed and well-crafted case for women prostitutes’ full civil and political inclusion, it does not question orthodox liberal narratives about property in the person, market relations, and human rights. Meanwhile, the emphasis on increasing “the status and respect” accorded to sex workers, alongside the inclusion of a chapter “sharing” the details of her own “commercial sexual experience,” suggests that Chapkis believes that the sexual-emotional labor involved in prostitution, like the emotion work involved in psychotherapy, acting, or the provision of day care, has some intrinsic social value. The implication is that sex work should be respected and socially honored because it expresses (or at least can, under the right circumstances express) a form of care or creativity.

This view is more explicitly elaborated in the work of “sex radical” feminists. Sex radical theory holds that the legal and social binaries of normal/abnormal, healthy/unhealthy, pleasurable/dangerous sex, as well as of gender itself, are profoundly oppressive. Thus, sex radicals celebrate consensual sexual practices that can be read as subverting such binaries (Vance 1984, Rubin 1999, Califia 1994). Through this lens, both the buying and selling of commercial sex appear as legitimate features of “erotic diversity.” Pat Califia, for example, holds that prostitution serves valuable social functions and would not disappear even in a society that had achieved full gender, race, and class equality: “There will always be people who don’t have the charm or social skill to woo a partner. In a society where mutual attraction and sexual reciprocity are the normal bases for bonding, what would happen to the unattractive people, those without the ability or interest to give as good as they get? Disabled people, folks with chronic or terminal illnesses, the elderly, and the sexually dysfunctional would continue to benefit (as they do now) from the ministrations of skilled sex workers who do not discriminate against these populations” (1994, 245).

Fetishists would also continue to provide demand for commercial sex, Califia goes on, since “many fetishist scripts are simply elaborate forms of sublimated and displaced masturbation that do not offer anything other than vicarious pleasure to the fetishist’s partner” (1994, 245). Prostitution obviates the need for anyone to, in Califia’s words, “play the martyr” in a relationship by selflessly indulging a partner’s fetish. And in her utopia, sex workers “would be teachers, healers, adventurous souls—tolerant and compassionate. Prostitutes are all of these things today, but they perform their acts of kindness and virtue in a milieu of ingratitude” (1994, 247).

In Chapkis’s and Califia’s writings, then, arguments about prostitution as a form of labor get conflated with claims about the social value of sex work and the client’s rights to access the services of prostitutes (see also Perkins and Ben- nett 1985; Queen 1997). Prostitutes should be socially honored because they facilitate the gratification of erotic needs that would otherwise go unmet, just as health care professionals and teachers should be honored because they meet the population’s health and educational needs. And because it meets human needs, prostitution, like medicine and education, would persist in a society that had achieved full gender, race, and class equality.

This takes us a long way from the idea of prostitution as mere service work, for if the comparison were made with, say, jobs in the hotel industry or domestic work, the same arguments would be rather less convincing. (There will always be people who are too busy or important, or who simply cannot be bothered, to open the door for themselves, make their own beds, wash their own clothes, clean the lavatory after they have used it, and come the revolution, these people would continue to benefit, as they do now, from the ministrations of skilled and professional doorpersons, chamber maids, and domestic workers.) Indeed, the fact that these writers compare sex work to healing or psychotherapy and think in terms of some kind of transcendental human need for prostitution suggests that they are quite as reluctant as “radical” feminists to strip sex of its “unique relationship to the self,” albeit for very different reasons. Where “radical feminists” think prostitution is fundamentally wrong because it commodifies something that cannot be detached from the self, the “sex work” feminists considered here think it is fundamentally right because it provides clients with access to something they require to fulfill their human needs and express their true selves. This latter belief is certainly shared by the clients I have interviewed, who invariably explain their own prostitute use through reference to the idea of sexual “need” (O’Connell Davidson 1998). But what does it mean to speak of erotic “needs?”

From Erotic “Needs” to Despotic Subjects

Deprived of sexual gratification, people do not suffer in the same way they do when other basic bodily needs are denied or when medical attention is refused.2 There is no biological imperative to orgasm any set number of times a day, week, or year, and though people may find it unpleasant or even uncomfortable to go without sexual release (assuming they are unable or find it undesirable to masturbate), the absence of a sexual partner to bring them to orgasm does not actually threaten their physical survival. Human sexual desire is grounded in emotional and cognitive, as much as physiological, processes. If the urge to reach orgasm were a simple biological function, such as the impulse to evacuate the bowels, it would hardly matter whether the person with whom you had sex was old or young, or man or woman. Equally, if a lack of sexual contact posed a threat to health, such that one needed the “ministrations” of a sex worker in the same way one needs those of a doctor or a nurse when suffering from other ailments, then the physical appearance, age, gender, and race of the prostitute would be unimportant. But sex is not a mere bodily function or physical need. Our erotic life is grounded in the ideas we use to categorize, interpret, and give meaning to human experience and sociality, and specific sexual desires do not, therefore, directly express some fundamental, timeless, or general human need for sex. To treat them as if they do is hugely problematic.

What follows from the assertion that every individual is entitled to satisfy their exact erotic “requirements?” Califia asks us to accept that wanting “to be kicked with white patent-leather pumps with thirteen straps and eight-inch heels” (1994, 245), is an erotic need. But what if someone felt s/he could only be sexually gratified if it was Princess Anne or Queen Latifa wearing the patent- leather pumps? Would that also be a “need?” And what of, say, a white racist’s specific and narrowly focused desire to anally penetrate black women, or an adult male’s “need” to be fellated by eleven-year-old children? Since non-masturbatory sex by definition involves another person or persons, to grant one the right to control the if, when, with whom, and how of having sex would very often be to deny those same rights to another.
Gayle Rubin has argued: “In Western culture, sex is taken all too seriously. A person is not considered immoral, is not sent to prison, and is not expelled from her or his family for enjoying spicy cuisine. But an individual may go through all this and more for enjoying shoe leather. Ultimately, of what possible social significance is it if a person likes to masturbate over a shoe? . . . If sex is taken too seriously, sexual persecution is not taken seriously enough. There is systematic mistreatment of individuals and communities on the basis of erotic taste or behavior” (1999, 171). But it seems to me that sex radicals also take certain aspects of sexual life far too seriously. Certainly it is ridiculous that a person’s shoe fetish can provoke community revulsion and expulsion. But it is equally ridiculous to elevate that person’s ability to indulge this fetish to the status of human right. If we are to say “so what?” about the fact someone likes to masturbate over a shoe, surely we can equally say “so what?” about the fact that s/he might have to make do with fantasizing about a shoe while masturbating, rather than thinking it imperative to set in place a social institution that will guarantee her/him access to a shoe whenever the urge to masturbate over one should arise.

At the same time, sex radical theory does not pay sufficient attention to the fact that “talk about sex is about a great deal else than organs, bodies and pleasures” (Laqueur 1995, 155). In using the example of a masturbatory fetish, Rubin evades the difficult issues that arise from the fact that non-masturbatory sex is, by definition, relational. To be sure, it is an intolerant and illiberal society that condemns a person for masturbating over a shoe. But since Rubin stresses that sex must be consensual, her own tolerance probably would not extend to an unknown man who happened to feel the “need” to masturbate over her shoe as they sat together in Starbucks, for example. Like Califia, she reserves for everyone both the right to gratify themselves as they wish, and the right not to “play the martyr” by indulging other people when it will bring them no personal gratification. Everyone, that is, except prostitutes, who are instead awarded the right to give up their right to personal pleasure from sex in exchange for payment.

The essence of the prostitution contract is that the prostitute agrees, in exchange for money or another benefit, not to use her personal desire or erotic interests as the determining criteria for her sexual interaction.3 What this means is that the prostitute must, at least during working hours, assume her or himself as the Other, fix her or himself as an object, in order that everyone else may always be able satisfy their erotic “needs” on demand. In other words, the existence of a market for commodified sex leaves room for every non-prostitute to become, in Simone de Beauvoir’s (1953) terms, a “despotic subject” should she or he so choose.

For feminist abolitionists, this subject/object distinction in prostitution necessarily corresponds to a patriarchal order within which men achieve self- sovereignty through the political subordination of women. This is to essentialize gender, and also implies an over-optimistic view of women, who are perfectly capable of pursuing “masculine” self-sovereignty through the objectification of racialized and/or classed Others, as demonstrated by the research of Jacqueline Sánchez Taylor (2001) on female sex tourism and that of Bridget Anderson (2000) on employers of migrant domestic workers. Feminist abolitionists fur- ther imagine that in requiring a woman to temporarily fix herself as an object, prostitution permanently, completely and literally extinguishes her as a subject. This glosses over the important (and sometimes hugely painful) fact that people do not either literally become, or come to see themselves as, objects even when they are treated as such. It also ignores the immense political dangers that go along with refusing any group of people full subjectivity, even when one’s aim is to help or “save” that group. But the sex radical position on prostitution, which embraces despotic subjecthood as a delightful and ideal condition, is surely every bit as politically dangerous.
The Politics of Rights and Respect
Noting that the early feminist movement called for the labor involved in mothering and caring for the old, the sick, or the disabled to be recognized as work, Mary McIntosh argues that the term “sex worker” both means that prostitutes “are women who are paid for what they do” and that “as with other women, what they do should be respected as a skilled and effortful activity and not considered simply as a natural capacity of every woman” (1994, 13). But feminist calls for the labor involved in social reproduction to be recognized and rewarded have generally been advanced on the basis that this labor has intrinsic social worth, not simply because it is skilled and effortful. Indeed, this is partly why domestic and caring labor remains a difficult issue for feminists, for as Anderson’s work shows, socially reproductive labor does not simply fulfill physical needs but “is bound up with the reproduction of life-style and, crucially, of status” (2000, 14). So, for example, the tasks performed by paid domestic workers often serve to demonstrate or raise their employer’s status rather than having an inherent social value. There are even employers who demand that their domestic worker wash the anus of the family pet after it has defecated (Anderson 2000, 26), something which requires skill and effort, but is hardly necessary either to any individual or to our collective survival.

Given the enormity of the stigma that attaches to female prostitution and its consequences for women’s lives, it is easy to understand sex workers’ rights activists’ impulse to try to reconstruct prostitution as an intrinsically honorable profession that serves socially valuable ends. But without insisting that human beings have sexual “needs,” rather than socially constructed desires, this position is difficult to sustain. It is fairly easy to make the case that we should attach social honor to the task of changing a baby’s diaper, but hard to see how one would argue that social honor should be attached to the task of cleaning the anus of a perfectly healthy dog, or to the tasks performed by prostitutes in order to satisfy their clients’ sexual whims.

To attempt to destigmatize prostitution by insisting on its social value also carries risks as a political strategy. There is a danger of simply creating new hierarchies and fresh divisions. If prostitutes are to be respected because they undertake socially valuable work, surely those who specialize in working with severely disabled clients will be deemed somehow more respectable than those who give blow jobs to able-bodied men out on their stag night, for example? This division already exists in the Netherlands where “sex surrogates” who work with disabled people are legally and socially constructed as different from prostitutes who work with able-bodied clients. And does this argument not construct the prostitute who meets a client’s erotic needs as somehow more worthy of respect than the domestic worker who acquiesces to an employer’s demands?

In an unequal world, opportunities to devote one’s life to socially honored goals are classed, gendered and raced. The fact that an individual engages in a form of labor not considered socially valuable thus says nothing about her personal integrity or honor, and vice versa. Becoming a heart surgeon is not proof of the nobility of spirit of a white middle-class man, and becoming a university professor does not demonstrate the personal integrity of a white middle-class woman. A person’s human, civil, and labor rights, and their right to respect and social value as a human being, cannot be contingent upon whether or not they perform labor that is socially valued. The university teacher, the heart surgeon, the prostitute, and the domestic worker are all equally entitled to rights and protection as economic actors. Those who work in prostitution have rights and deserve respect not because or despite the fact they work as prostitutes, but because they are human beings. Likewise, our claim to legal recognition, rights, dignity, and respect lies in the fact that we are human beings, not that we are able-bodied or disabled, black or white, straight or gay, shoe fetishist or vanilla sex fetishist.

Behind and Beyond the Market

It is tempting to conclude that what is wrong with contemporary Euro-American feminist debate on prostitution is simply, as Delia Aguilar suggests, its lack of reference to “the basic concepts of class and social relations of production” (2000, 2). Certainly, the questions about prostitution that preoccupy many Euro-American feminists can seem irrelevant to a world in which vast numbers of people live in poverty, and the gulf between rich and poor continues to widen. Consider, for example, the fact that in India, a country with a per capita GDP of U.S.$383, some 2.3 million females are estimated to be in prostitution, a quarter of whom are minors; or that Burma, a country with a per capita GDP of just U.S.$69, exports an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 women and girls to work in prostitution in Thailand, while several thousand more cross the border into China to sell sex (Lim 1998, AMC 2000). Though some of these women and children have been forced into prostitution by a third party, it is dull economic compulsion that drives many of them into sex work, just as in America (a country with a per capita GDP of U.S.$21,558), many women and girls “elect” to prostitute themselves rather than join the 35 percent of the female workforce earning poverty-level wages (Castells 1998). To describe such individuals as exercising rights of self-sovereignty seems as spurious as stating that their prostitution represents a violation of their right to dignity. There is no dignity in poverty, which denies the person full powers of agency. Yet the right to sell one’s labor (sexual or otherwise) does not guarantee the restitution of dignity or moral agency.

But can simple appeal to basic concepts of class and social relations of production move forward the feminist debates on prostitution? Marxian analysts have rarely engaged with questions about the myriad historical and contemporary forms of sexual and gender oppression. Indeed, class theorists have often failed to critique liberal fictions about “public” and “private” as two distinct and clearly separated realms of human experience, instead focusing almost exclusively upon the injustices affecting (straight, white, male, skilled) workers in the supposedly “public” sphere of productive labor. Though they have very effectively critiqued liberal discourse on property, labor, and contractual consent as fictions concealing class power, Marxists have traditionally paid little attention to the ways in which liberal discourse shrouds and naturalizes power relations that are gendered, sexualized, and raced.
The concepts of class and social relations of production, as found in the conceptual toolbox of orthodox class theorists, may thus prove to be unwieldy instruments with which to explore the specificity of prostitution as a form of exploitation. To conceptualize prostitution without reference to questions about the relationship between sexuality, gender, selfhood, and community would be as unsatisfactory as to conceptualize prostitution without reference to class. We need to return to the fact that sex occupies a special and privileged place in both abolitionist and “sex work” feminist accounts of the rights and wrongs of prostitution. In this, both “sides” of the prostitution debate recognize and take seriously aspects of human existence and forms of oppression that are typically overlooked or trivialized in Marxian theory. What happens if we take such concerns seriously but simultaneously remain critical of liberal discourse?

Thomas Laqueur (1995) has observed that for centuries, masturbation and prostitution have been condemned with almost equal vigor in Judeo-Christian thought. Both have been constructed as fundamentally asocial, degenerative sexual practices, the antithesis of the “socially constructive act of heterosexual intercourse” (1995, 157). Both therefore represent a threat to the heterosexual family unit: “While masturbation threatened to take sexual desire and pleasure inward, away from the family, prostitution took it outward. . . . The problem with masturbation and prostitution is essentially quantitative: doing it alone and doing it with lots of people rather than doing it in pairs” (Laqueur 1995, 159–60; see also Agustin 2000).

The fact that in Euro-American societies, people who do not choose to embrace reproductive heterosexual coupledom have historically been, and still often are, viewed with such loathing, fear, and repugnance tells us something about how little we have actually managed to realize ourselves as the “abstract individuals” or “sovereign selves” of liberalism. Marx may have been correct (at least insofar as white middle-class male experience was concerned) to say that capitalism “is the realized principle of individualism; the individual existence is the final goal; activity, work, content, etc., are mere means” (in Sayer 1991, 58), but the idea of the solitary individual, as a subject, was and is conceivable primarily in relation to economic life. As sexual and engendered beings, we remain largely tied to our social context, our identities given by our position within a sexual community and gender hierarchy.

Marx observed that in the act of commodity exchange, “the individual, each of them, is reflected in himself as the exclusive and dominant (determining) subject of the exchange. With that the complete freedom of the individual is posited” (in Sayer 1991, 59). Sex radicals apply this bourgeois fiction to prostitution, imagining that by exchanging money for commodified sex, the individual is liberated from her or his fixed relationship to the sexual community, recognized as a sexual subject and set completely free. But any such “freedom” is contingent upon the existence of a particular, and highly unequal, set of political, economic, and social relations, since in general, people “choose” neither wage labor nor prostitution unless denied access to alternative means of subsistence. It is merely the “freedom” to picture the self in radical abstraction from social relations of power and to become a “despotic subject.” We need an alternative vision of the self. As Laura Brace observes, we need to “move beyond the liberal conception of the abstracted individual, without drowning the sovereign subject in the ocean of nondifferentiation” (1997, 137).

Masturbation may offer a useful starting point for any re-visioning of the sovereign sexual subject. Prostitute use can largely be understood as a response to the social devaluation of masturbation and sexual fantasy, the construction of masturbation as a form of sexual expression and experience which simply “does not count.” But as Paula Bennett and Vernon Rosario argue, “Beyond the constraints of orthodox reproductive practices, solitary pleasure is a fundamentally generative form of sexual behavior, deeply implicated in the creative process and therefore basic to much that is good and enriching in human life” (1995, 15). To recognize masturbation as such would carry enormous equalizing potential. We would not be debating whether disabled people need “sex surrogates,” but rather emphasizing the need to develop and make available technologies which would allow the disabled to enjoy the same access to solitary pleasure that is currently enjoyed by the able bodied. It would no longer be assumed that within a couple, it was each partner’s absolute responsibility to fulfill the other’s sexual “needs” or that love and emotional intimacy implied a sexual claim over our partner’s person. No one would “need” to sublimate and displace masturbation by paying a prostitute to temporarily surrender aspects of her will.

I am not proposing that we attempt to sidestep the relational nature of sexuality by simply replacing sexual interaction with masturbation, nor am I arguing that fantasies and fetishes should never be enacted. I would not even claim that masturbation and fantasy are necessarily as pleasurable or satisfying as sex with other people and/or the enactment of fantasies. But if masturbation was socially valued in the same way that heterosexual coupling now is, we would all be in a position to recognize and realize ourselves as sexual subjects, without turning anyone else into an object. And on those occasions that we happened to be lucky enough to find mutual and reciprocal desire with another or others, whether partner, friend, or stranger, it might then be possible to appreciate, value and choose non-masturbatory sex for its relational qualities and connective potential.

As well as being right to call for prostitutes to be accorded the same legal and political rights and protections as their fellow citizens, it seems to me that “sex work” feminists are right to (implicitly) argue that we should refuse traditional demands to subordinate our sexual selves to socially “productive” goals through heterosexual coupling. But if they wish to represent or advance the interests of more than just a privileged minority of “First World” women, they need to look beyond the market for an alternative to the yoke of tradition, and beyond liberal discourse on property, contractual consent, and freedom for ways of conceptualizing the rights and wrongs of prostitution as a form of work.

Notes:
I am grateful to Bridget Anderson, Jacqueline Sánchez Taylor, Laura Agustin, the individuals who refereed this paper, and above all to Laura Brace, for extremely helpful comments on the ideas in this paper.
1. The chapter provides an account of how Chapkis and twenty other women paid a “sacred prostitute” and her “consort” to provide a milieu within which they could have group sex with each other. Nobody had any form of sexual contact with the women who organized and charged for the event. It seems unlikely that many prostitutes‘ clients would part with money for this, and Chapkis does not explicitly stake out her position on the rights or wrongs of more conventional forms of prostitute use. However, it seems reasonable to conclude that she does not find anything problematic in the demand for commercial sex per se.
2. It is true that people can be profoundly harmed when they are socially, politi- cally and legally excluded or marginalized on grounds of their supposed sexual “Other- ness,” but the psychological and emotional distress they may suffer is linked to something rather more complex than the inability to instantly gratify a wish for a particular kind of sex at a particular moment in time.
3. Skilled and professional prostitutes who work independently and who are not economically desperate certainly impose limits on the contact (refusing clients who are drunk or threatening, turning down requests for unprotected sex, or for sexual acts that they find particularly intrusive or unpleasant, for example). But few prostitutes would be able to make a living if they only ever agreed to sex with clients they found attractive or to perform acts they personally found sexually or psychologically gratifying.
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Joke’s on You

As I write this, I’m planning my first European Vacation. I was digging through old writing tidbits and found this short but interesting post I forgot I wrote. Enjoy!

I like bad puns. My father and I maintain contact by sharing ‘dadjokes’ back and forth and remembering days past. Whenever I see a potential source for new ones I peruse it eagerly, thinking of the easy days when dad was young and carefree and so was I. In perusing one of many sources for the charming yet elusive dad joke, I found this one:

A man and a woman went on a fishing trip. The man wasn’t feeling well so he stayed in bed while the woman took the boat and went on the lake to read a book. The game warden comes by and seeing all the fishing gears in the boat, asks her for her fishing license. She said it was her husband’s gear and she was just reading. The warden says to her it doesn’t matter. She has all the equipments on board and could start anytime. The women than tells him if he writes her a ticket, she would accuse him of sexual aggression. Shocked, the warden why she would do that ?!? She responds that he has all the equipment and could start anytime.

Because I choose to follow mostly sex workers and sex work rights activists on social media, I see a lot of articles and sound bytes about nonsense, exaggerations, outright lies, and abuses by cops. They are generally our greatest threat and operate with a long reign and loose collar when it comes to erotic service providers. The above is a joke but it is so incredibly similar to real life instances where women are arrested because they look like working girls or they’re carrying the wrong things in their purses that my laughter gets a bit choked off. I’m no expert. I know only my own experience but I’ve seen enough news activity to see in this more irony than I think is intended.

Writers’ insecurity

I’ve been thinking about writing, among other things. My motivation for it has changed over time from desire to need. I feel like I repeat myself a lot so I went back to retread old blog posts. I wanted to remember what I had written so I didn’t rehash old ideas more than necessary. Wow. No wonder people tell me I’m a good writer. Those first few musings are old enough to be new to me, creative writing at its best. My writing now is motivated in a large part by my self imposed deadlines and an urge to write a book that will 1: provide me passive income and 2: help direct public opinion away from end demand, the client is the enemy mentality. I feel like it’s changed the way I write. I no longer let my thoughts flow through the keyboard, I push and shove them, trying to make them fit the thought of the day. Instead of thinking “that would make a great blog post” I think “would that make a good blog post? I’ll write it down just in case.” Writing is structured and bounded and as I write that, it takes me back to one of my early posts in which I mention freedom in boundaries. Perhaps the boundaries and pressure of writing a thought already formed isn’t a bad way to write. Perhaps I can use that to form meaningful ideas and share them with the world, albeit the small part of it that reads my blog.

I don’t pay attention to statistics so I don’t actually know how many people read my blog. I also don’t open comments because I get so damn much spam and it seems unhelpful to wade through dozens of spam attacks for one or two meaningful comments. I get a lot of feedback in session from gentlemen who find the blog enticing, reassuring, something that tells them I’m a safer bet than others. Or maybe it’s something that makes them feel like they know me better. Certainly knowing someone is better than not knowing them when you expect to be backed together within a half hour of meeting them. I also get the occasional email letting me know they appreciate my work (I haven’t replied but I saw it and thank you for your kind words.)

Perhaps my feelings of, not writers block but writers insecurity, may lead me toward more free and open penmanship.

Speaking of, I won’t be taking my computer with me on my trip. I figure while someone might steal that, no one’s going to steal a journal so all my writing will be done by hand, on paper, in an actual book. My partner did a lot of traveling years ago and still flips through old journals sometimes. I’d like that experience. For the same reason, I’m going to buy a bunch of those shitty disposable cameras and look forward to the mixed blessing of film. It’s so clear, so candid, but you can’t really tell if a photo will turn out. I expect some silly photos, maybe half-selfies, some odd or outlandish landscapes, and some really terrible shots. But that’s part of the fun: interpreting the modern hieroglyphs of carefully oxidized chemicals to find the meaning, the moment behind them.

I’m looking forward to watching my elegant blue pen draw boxy letters again and again across the page. I already bought a fresh journal. Not that fresh means anything since I don’t really journal anyway, but it’s new, ready for my first overseas adventure. I don’t even remember what’s on the cover, a quote or something, what matters is that it has lines and lies flat on the spine so I can write from margin to margin.

I packed today. 11 days, 20 hours until departure. My clothes will stay in that bag until we check in in Reykjavik. I am excited. I am terrified. But mostly excited. I’ve never been to a country that doesn’t have English as a major language. That won’t change until the end of the trip, but it will change and it’s exciting but also makes me nervous. What if I make someone angry and I can’t fix it? Words are my offense, my defense, my pride, my security, what happens when they’re useless? I’m sure I’ll be fine, it’s not like I’m entering a war zone (though we’ll see how Brexit falls out) so I don’t really have anything to worry about, but it’s a big deal, visiting another continent for the first time.

My partner chimes in from the couch “what are you writing?” He’s heard the tip tapping of my keyboard off and on all day. I’ve written four posts today to keep up my Thursday updates while I’m overseas. Some are easy: copy/paste, edit, post, but some take thought and the pressure of productivity stunts those thoughts. I use the word ‘I’ too much. I talk about myself and self analyze too much. My book review is too subjective. I can only see the opinions of the author through my own lens and it feels so damn shallow!

I’ve been reading the presidents’ biographies (plus a few First Ladies) and they are both inspiring and demoralizing. They did so much, were so flawed, and I am by turns faced with my own inadequacies and motivated to recreate their accomplishments within my own tiny sphere. I am not a small personality; I crave recognition and admiration but cringe at the idea of underserved respect. There is no room left for me, with a small group of wealthy, educated friends, to create an anti rely new country. That is absolutely some of what motivates my desire for decriminalization. I want sex workers and sex work historians to write about me, to appreciate my life’s work, to give me the longevity only accomplishment can earn. I also want to open a cathouse but that’s another issue.

Look at me: lamenting my self centered worldview by analyzing myself and posting it on the Internet for all to see. I could buckle down, work harder, make money, and retire but that feels hollow (now at least. We’ll see how I feel at age 65) in the light of what I could accomplish. I’m usually pretty good at bringing my posts back to a theme: I love my work, I love my clients, and I want decriminalization. I’m pretty sure that this tirade, this odd and sudden baring of the soul, is tied into how I feel about my work and my life but it doesn’t take center stage this time. It’s almost as if sex workers exist outside the role of sex worker, haha! There it is, my one-two punch for sex workers rights.

I’ll be out for a walk soon and then to bed. I’ve got a relatively busy day tomorrow, good since I’m missing out entirely on next month’s income, and I should get to bed at a reasonable hour.

…time passes…

I wrote that at the end of a long cerebral day of writing.* I’m still new to this whole writing thing so I’m not used to the feeling of mental exhaustion and physical restlessness that comes with that. A few days’ perspective helps my mental recovery, coupled with a cup of coffee with a new friend and general good will toward humanity. I feel better but I want to hold on to that self analysis and give myself the freedom to write freely and glowingly again. This post feels like a step in the right direction.

I won’t write a new blog post until after I return and write up excerpts from my journal, thoughts, and recollections of adventures. Everything that will post throughout September has already been written, edited, and scheduled to publish. I’m looking forward to the freedom of freehand and the absence of deadlines, self imposed or otherwise.

Why Do YOU Do It?

I wrote last week about Miss Keller and her attempt to force her young female students into more masculine activities. I talked about categories of people, be it gender related, personality related, or racially biased. I’ve been thinking about categories for a while now as it relates t my clients. I may have written about this before but I want to really dig into this idea of the three reasons people seek out sex workers.

This will be one of the themes to the book I’m working on. The other is me since I’m the only connecting thread between all my clients, but that’s a much larger idea and a longer story to tell. Later. The theme for the book is that the categories are helpful, elastic, and none greater or more acceptable than the others.

First reason is for fun. Sex is fun, it feels good before, during, and after. We anticipate and feel the effects of our anticipation throughout our body and during the day leading up to it. I know one beloved who spend several days b enforce hand getting a pedicure and a manicure, doing a full body scrub, trimming and shaving everything smooth and soft, and stopping off for a bottle of wine and some nibbles. It’s part of the ritual and part of what makes the fun last longer. Another spends our entire hour together edging, drawing out the pleasure until the last possible moment, both of us working towards the constant upward climb with the focus on the pleasure of now and the joy of a powerful orgasm. Yet another beloved looks toward the evening, using several appointments during the day as part of his foreplay with his kinky girlfriend. His focus is on the build for later. He holds off on his orgasm all day, stimulated but waiting, holding onto the feeling of delayed pleasure until it’s almost painful and he can share the intensity with the woman he loves. In all cases, they’re focused on how fun and pleasurable it is to feel sexual, to let the pleasure of erotic touch from a respected provider be what it is and to feel, not guilt or shame, but exultation and powerful, sexual, fun.

(Special mention goes to my 92 year old beloved who is determined to see as wide a variety of high quality sexual service providers before he goes. World War Two vet, avid sportsman, clever, charming, and adventuresome, if I can behalf as vital at half his age I’ll count myself a success. For him, I think, this is pure good fun!)

The second reason and most common for regulars is sustenance. The stereotype is the sexless marriage; children, time, life, health all change and sometimes the change removes sex from the relationship. For whatever reason, neither partner can leave and so they seek outside companionship. Affairs can be messy and compromise the integrity of what relationship there is so many men (and some women) in these situations seek professionals to meet their desire for calm, nonjudgemental, safe, sexual human contact. There may be fun, as well, if there wasn’t I imagine they’d find another provider, but the primary purpose for seeking sexual services isn’t the sex, it’s the intimacy and emotional support that helps sustain them during their daily lives. I’ve seen single men who are frustrated with the dating scene, businessmen who don’t have time for traditional relationships, married men with ailing or non sexual wives, some who’ve told their partners, most who haven’t. When their life circumstances change, they may move on to more traditional relationships or simply to a provider who offers something different, or they may stay inside the comfort of a long standing, uncomplicated provider-client relationship even through life adjustments. Whatever happens, they are the most pleasant, consistent darlings and they are the ones who most often break my heart and heal it again.

And then there are the healing and the learning. The healers are those who recently experienced a major life change, most often divorce or loss of a spouse but any personal loss can effect someone’s desire for sexual contact. I see an arc in the healers, beginning with their ability to share their trauma and experience loving sexual touch, sometimes for the first time in years. As they get more accustomed to it and our relationship builds, I watch them grow in confidence and they begin to expand in their personal lives, be it reentering the dating world, beginning creative projects, finding joy in daily life, and generally reenergizing. The learners are often shy, seeking knowledge about themselves and their sexual partners. Young shy people, suddenly expected to perform in an extroverts world, baby kinksters who want to explore new things and need a safe place to play, some have an idea that there’s more to making love than what the’ve seen so far and want to explore, most have no idea at all.

Clients slide between these three general reasons for seeking sexual services, often coming for more than one reason though sometimes it takes a while for us to figure out which ones. Healers become fun seekers, sustainers become healers, fun seekers become sustainers, and all the reasons jumble together in a beautifully dynamic journey. Some people draw lines between acceptable reasons to seek sexual services and unacceptable reasons, claiming that the healers need services but the sustainers are wasting their money and the fun seekers are exploitative. Within the political movement to decriminalize the exchange of sexual services for a fee, we see the danger in those lines. While the stories of the healers might be legitimate, popular, emotionally compelling arguments for decriminalization, we cannot let their needs delegitimization the motivations of other clients.

Providers also have these primary reasons for providing sexual services. Some do it for fun: because they enjoy the sexual activities they share with their clients, because they enjoy expanding their sexual repertoires, because they enjoy a lifestyle above what they might have otherwise, or simply because they enjoy meeting interesting people. Most do it for sustenance: to provide for themselves and their families, sometimes to sustain poor habits, and some because the emotionally rewarding experiences help them maintain high self worth. And some do it for healing: to solve a financial problem, to learn about themselves, to take control of their lives and find a new adventure. Again, providers slide from motivation to motivation: I started for fun, because it sounded pleasurable and adventurous and I was attracted to the idea of fast easy money. I stayed for sustenance, to keep a pleasant roof over my head, good food on my table, and to find time for self improvement. I now enjoy the benefits and privileges of all three reasons: I learn and grow from my interactions with the healers, I exchange pleasure with the fun seekers, I sustain my long time regulars, and all our relationships enrich my life. While I am fortunate enough to enjoy all these, not all providers can or do but again, telling some sex work stories as if they are better or more right than others is to lose out on the variety and depth of human experience and choice.

There would be no healing without fun, no sustenance without constant healing, no fun without a sustainable relationship. To attempt to parse out and draw lines between what is a good reason to consent to sexual activity and what is a bad reason to consent to sexual activity is to destroy the autonomy that all consent relies on.

Cabin Time

It is done. I write this on the penultimate day with only myself and my partner left to slowly but surely clean up after over twenty loved ones have come and gone. The beds have been stripped and laundry is running, dishes are clean and put away, food has been eaten, packed or thrown away, and only the last tasks of retrieving items left at the dock, cleaning the floors, and locking up are left. It is quiet, save for the whine of the drier and the sounds of my partner puttering through a myriad of little tidying tasks that aren’t exactly necessary but add that homey touch. The sun is out, slanting through fluffy white clouds rolling over the treetops. I’ll have to change into cooler clothes soon as the day heats up and my casual sweats and calf length boots get too warm.

My time here has been long and interesting. On day one we drove out from Seattle, I settled sleepily in the passenger seat, he speeding along to the tune of NPR and The Splendid Table. We settled in, unpacked, and set to work. I was not happy.

My first mental shift happened on day three. Driving out, I got into vacation mode. I was ready to sit back, drink some wine, read my book, and relax. Unfortunately, there were too many tasks needed to make the place pleasant for me to simply settle in quietly. There were flower beds to be weeded, holes to be patched, gutters to be cleaned, floors to be swept, and a dock to repair. I felt cheated, like I had worked hard, made money, and earned my vacation but here was more work I had to do! I moped and pouted as he ran around getting things done and in my feelings of being slighted, sniped at him spitefully. We went into town for some last minute errand running and the whole time I felt like I deserved something easier. Instead of the cool and clean communication we usually enjoy, I was passive aggressive and opaque. This started when we arrived, continued through day two and didn’t disappeared until the morning of day three. I woke up and decided to do some yoga. I have little book and went through the beginner poses for about an hour and by the time I was done, it was only 11 in the morning and I already felt accomplished. It felt natural to weed the flower beds while he sprayed sealant on the gutters and mixed cement for the patio. We chatted and listened to the radio and, though I was physically working, it felt easy. I scattered flower seeds under dark soil and watered the newly turned beds. I swept and raked and weeded the downstairs patio, removing the accumulated pine needles and leaves of the last year and yanking tufts of grass from the cracks. I finished it off with a few deck chairs and felt good and proud, like I often do after a session in which my skills clearly show. I had shifted from grumpy mode into cabin time.

Cabin time is an interesting phenomenon. You sleep when you’re sleepy, eat when the food is ready, fish for however long you want, drink slowly, chat lazily, move or sit still for as long as it feels right, and listen to the natural rhythms of your own internal switches. There are few clocks around here and even then we don’t pay close attention. The funny thing is, your body sets a much better time than you set by a clock. Alarms, deadlines, timetables, check in-check out, hurry hurry hurry all stresses your body so when you wake up, you’re tired and when you go to bed you can’t fall asleep. Out here, you just stay up talking until you feel sleepy and you wake up when you have to pee. I was up by nine or ten most days, except this morning because I stayed up until 1:30 talking about sex work and libertarianism (with friends who don’t know about my true profession, so even cooler than usual). Cabin time means giving your body the time it needs to reset and do what it needs to do.

So I was on cabin time, relaxing into tasks, constantly moving until my body is ready to stop. Now our friends began arriving. A few from our local watering hole, a few from my college days, and the next day my brother and his budding family. Tents started popping up and beds filled, couches got rearranged, people started mingling.

I got to spend some quality time with my brother’s new girlfriend. She and I are closer in ideology than she and my brother but his extreme sanguinity means that as long as they agree on the important parts, which they seem to, they should be alright. I played with my nephew for hours. We tossed a ball and chased each other around and I had the satisfaction of giving my brother some much needed time off. I also had a bit of a very powerful brownie provided by one of my beloved clients that made me laugh at the things a four year old laughs at which helped. I had brunch with my old college friends who joked about boners and bought pies to share with the group. We walked and chatted and renewed bonds several years removed. My mother spent a night, sharing a bit of time with her son, possible future daughter in law, and grandson and a lot of time with me and my friends. Who knew I could bond with my mother over a dump run, haha! I am more and more reaching a mutual respect with both my parents. I think the day is coming In a year or so from now that I can talk with both of them plainly about my profession and my passions. His brother came by with a five year old so once again I took over babysitting duties. We frolicked in the lake, getting on and off all the floating creations we use to entertain and support ourselves and exchanging a constant stream of dialogue. My mother chimed in “I would have more sympathy for you but you did it to yourself.” I think she also saw an echo of my own constant chatter in this curious child and it amused her to see me treading her own path 22 years ago, even for only an afternoon.

People began to trickle away. Flights departed, cars disappeared into the woods, and slowly the cabin emptied until today, when it is just Us again. I’m looking forward to when the work is done and we can look at this place with pride as we ourselves vanish back to the city. I will miss it. I will always miss it as a busy, relaxing, healing respite from the routine of busses and bodywork, missed connections and gridlock. It’s been three years since the first time I came out to The Cabin and I finally feel what he feels for it. This is home. This is a place where family fights, friends love, you work and relax with equal vigor, and the more sweat that goes in the more love comes out.

Rose has been watching my inbox for me; I’ve checked in now and again just to stay abreast of what is happening but for days at a time I’ve not looked at or for my phone. I think this is the final step in my disconnection. While I use my digital connection to the world for many things, it will no longer be a tether. I have shed the need to constantly check in, knowing that my world, generally, will take care of itself.

My moods and opinions, influenced by my time here with loved ones and finally negating the bitter input from TNA and some Twitter feeds, have swung once more towards faith in humanity’s general goodness and, while I am aware of the constant violence that rocks our modern world, I am not afraid. People die, the world changes, and sometimes it is rough but come what may, humanity will always live and most people, many people, are good and decent. I will continue to hold myself, my friends, and my clients to a higher standard of thought and behavior and I will continue to campaign for our right to mingle and entertain each other.

So here’s a glass of your beverage of choice, raised to good friends, the good of humanity, and cabin time

By Any Other Name

My sincerest apologies to those of you who have been surprised by my new assistant Rose. I’ve been terribly, delightfully busy for the last few weeks and she and I have been coordinating and learning and running around trying to help you and me and her all fit together well. I’ll tell the whole story soon but the long and short of it is that I got busy, not only busy but I developed an aversion to answering emails, particularly from new people. Screening was like pulling teeth in some cases and even minor lapses in communication caused me to respond with sharp words, or at least thoughts. It got to the point that a dozen little irritations colored every experience. I was so sensitized to petty things that I sometimes didn’t notice my own mistakes. I’m not normally easily irritable in general, so what happened?

What happened was my own thoughts; I spent too much time dwelling on negative interactions. Partly because there were enough new inquiries that weren’t consistent or complete and still needed attention but mostly because I had spent too much time reading ABOUT things that annoy people. Three threads in particular confirmed my decision to avoid the discussion threads on TNA.

The first, titled ‘what keeps a provider OFF your to do list?’, invited negative feedback by its very syntax. It was specifically asking for people to list negative behaviors. The sister thread, ‘what keeps a hobbyist OFF your to do list?’ was similarly worded to invite descriptions of bad behavior. When it occurred to me how inherently negative they were, I started my own, titled ‘What gets someone ON your to do list?’ I was proud of the first round of replies, people responding with appreciation for and positive comments on great treatment they had received in the past that made them want to see a provider or a client. And yet even that had a short life. One of my beloved clients responded, complementing me on the question and my general behavior, and was immediately passive-aggressively insulted by one of my friends. That was my last straw. I had been debating to myself a severe restriction of my TNA consumption and this was simply the nail in the coffin. I check up every once in a while to see what’s being said but in general I’ve shifted my attention elsewhere. While the first two threads are regularly bumped to the top of the discussion page, the third, doomed question fell farther and farther behind, buried under graphic images, rants, and petty bickering.

After limiting my TNA intake and giving Rose the responsibility for scheduling, my feelings of appreciation and positivity have gone through the roof. I am excited as fuck for my sessions and the quality has been steadily improving. There are several other contributors to my emotional success and sustainability but at the moment, Rose’s prompt, professional assistance, clear communication, and enterprising initiative is number one. Limiting my TNA exposure helped, but Rose’s aid over the last few weeks has been that last leg supporting my positivity. Numina Faye was with me as Rose began to tackle my inbox and I watched my notifications slowly dwindle. She watching with envy as the constant, low level stress of unread emails slipped away and I could focus on our time together (naked. In the hot tub).

I mentioned legs and support and such things and I wanted to give a shout out to some of my other supportive sisters. Numina and I spent a few days in Portland and in every work related conversation we both shared such pleasure and appreciation for our work that, though I was socially worn out by the time I got home (I know, socially worn out? ME? Haha), It was a happy glow kind of worn out. Sofina and I had dinner last week and again, work related conversation was overwhelmingly appreciative of our support systems, our beloved clients, and the astonishing realization that we might be in the minority in our attitudes. Adelle is consistently grounded, having trod this trail before me and made many of the same discoveries. I walk away from our every interaction feeling reassured, determined, satisfied, heartened, and loved. Danielle is a constant reminder of how lucky we are to share an industry that is constantly new, full of the most incredible people, always prodding us to grow in ourselves, and always a source of unrestrained enthusiasm. Savanna Sly*, lioness among lambs, exposes herself to social and political danger on my behalf and yours, bestowing and commanding respect wherever she goes, teaching the infant activist in me and sharing my respect for and appreciation of our beloved clients. Claire, so new to this world but already so perceptive, learning and growing and filling my incall with the most amazing positive vibes. Me, lucky to have so many colleagues who share my outlook, who lift me and support me as I lift and support them in turn.

*Savanna, for those who don’t know, is the SWOP-USA president and one of my most respected colleagues and activists. Others may make more noise, others may be more specialized, but Savanna is a connector, able to build bridges, listen and truly hear, and help shape national energy in the coming movement towards decriminalization. If you, beloved client, want us both to meet safe from legal or social punishment, please book an appointment with her (she does ProDomme and FBSM work) or if you can’t, donate to her living expenses/SWOP-Seattle/SWOP-USA. She’s only a visitor to Seattle but I can put you in contact if you wish.

Died of a Broken Heart

My heart broke today. I send out an infrequent and irregular email newsletter partly to remind my lovely clients that they should come see me but mostly just to send updates about my activities into a slightly more curated void than a public blog. I sent out my email this afternoon and received this automated response:

“Thank you for your time…..however….it is time I move on with my life and recommit myself to the ones who have loved me. I am guilty of horrible transgressions and now must attempt to rebuild my life and embrace my children and wife of 29 years. This email account will no longer be active….may God bless you….and I pray he forgive me.

Please wish me luck as I attempt to rebuild my life from the few pieces that remain.”

My responses are many and varied but the overwhelming sense is one of loss. This industry can provide the impetus and the safe structure to reexamine your personal life and realign your actions with your personal ethic. Unfortunately, because of the socially acceptable narrative regarding sex work, that reexamination is often fraught with anger, shame, regret, and a sense of loss instead of gain. While I applaud this gent’s rededication to his life and family, these two tiny paragraphs catch at my throat as I read them to myself.

Horrible transgressions? Confusion or neglected or anger need a safe outlet and professional providers can help create that. Rebuild your life? He and the providers who saw him through the rebuilding deserve respect, not shame. Any God worth worshipping will forgive confusion and the deception necessitated by broken relationships.

I do wish him luck, though I also wish him and his loved ones a healthy sense of humanity. We all make mistakes. Sometimes they involve withholding sex from our husbands, sometimes they involve deceiving our wives. Sometimes they involve impulsive decisions, sometimes they involve long term planning. Humans make mistakes, then we learn from them. It’s how we have lived life for millennia and the fact that I can feel this client’s self hatred through his words makes me angry. While I don’t agree with deception or spending money you don’t have, discovering this industry does not happen in a vacuum and obviously he learned something valuable as fuck in his adventures.

If anyone reading this is looking to either exit or enter this industry (provider or client), please try to keep shame out of the equation. An honest assessment of your situation, absent the whirlwind of society’s negative emotional narrative, can do wonders. Recognize that sometimes this is a safe and reasonable answer to a problem, sometimes it is not but in neither case should you considering it or me offering it raise feelings of shame and anger. Please. I beg you: think clearly and forgive yourself a little.

Facing Mortality: A Beloved Client in Distress

I’ve been collecting oral histories from my clients. Or at least, I have collected one oral history so far. The plan is to compile the brief history of you as you, the client, have come to know me or my colleagues. The purpose is to show the myriad paths that lead clients to erotic service providers and, more importantly, to break the stereotype of the innocent man lured in by the wiles of the wanton woman or the evil, disgusting pervert who takes advantage of poor, victimized women. My compilation should inspire laughter, tears, and a sense of connection from the reader to the gentlemen found within the pages.

One gent in particular was high on my list. At 89 years old he discovered erotic service providers and proceeded to visit us all. Old Cowboy has come to be known, loved, and respected by provider and client alike. His story is both beautiful, innocent, and just naughty enough to make me giggle. The white half of a forbidden interracial love, nationally renowned sportsman, world traveler, sensualist, and still in possession of great wit, Old Cowboy is an inspiration to all who know him in person or by reputation.

Unfortunately, he is currently under medical duress. I do not feel comfortable disclosing anything specific, suffice it to say I and many of my colleagues are concerned. One of our own is by his side and can relay well wishes and messages of care and admiration but I feel the community at large would like to know. When Froggy Goes A’Courtin’ passed away, our community was able to share via our message board his status and our thoughts and well wishes. Now that we are once again in danger of losing one of our own I can only hope that my little corner of the Internet will suffice. Providers, please feel free to share with your clients. Clients, feel free to share with your ATFs. Things like this need community because who else can we share it with?

I recognize the selfishness of attaching my own thoughts to someone else’s tragedy but this is my little corner of the Internet and so I will take a few paragraphs for my response.

First, I’m not sad. My own sense of mortality still hasn’t hit me as a younger person with all eight grandparents still around. The idea that someone with so much life and energy is in danger of losing it doesn’t resonate with me; it hasn’t hit me in my gut yet.

Second, while I will miss more contact with Old Cowboy, that’s an incredibly selfish reason to regret someone else’s mortality. I hope for him many more years of joy and vitality but if he has none left, I know from even the little I knew of him that he has lived a FULL life and I feel privileged for the time and humor he shared with me.

Finally, it reminds me of a conversation I’ve had off and on with Adelle Sabatier. She began her erotic services career at a young age and has always attracted a mature clientele. She has watched her clients go through loss and change and has seen the gray turn to white over the last decade. As a young woman just entering her fourth decade, she is the only of her peers to face the mortality of her closest friends and supporters. Hopefully that day is far off for me but it could come as early as tomorrow.

I wish him all the best and I know you do, too. He has a great sense of humor and he would hate to have us worry instead of celebrating so you’ll find no sadness around these parts, only inspiration, delightful memories, and huge hopes for all our futures.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote

It seems unusual that I should not have seen such an iconic film as Breakfast at Tiffany’s but the title suggested to me a frivolous theme akin to an early sex and the city. The book is short, a few bus rides long, but tells the complete, poignant, irritating story of Miss Holiday Golightly, traveling.

I was going to try to write a review through a purely academic lens, addressing my thoughts about Miss Golightly without too much coloration from my perspective as a provider of erotic and companionable services, but I found myself constantly irritated at her usurpation of my profession (though of course it’s not the same and she came first). I found her conduct to be unethical and unbecoming, her treatment of her friends to be childish, and her fixation on money over affection demoralizing.

First, though, the writing is gorgeous. Evocative, descriptive, poignant, sometimes surprising, I felt every moment like I was watching a film or even living life along with Holly and her friends. I’ve never read anything by Truman Capote but I. am now convinced. He has an unusual way of working with sex workers as a narrative component as demonstrated in the short story ‘House of Flowers’ and also the pastimes of miss Golightly. It may be a side effect of him exploring alternative relationship styles but in any case it’s fair, in that dramatic writers make use equally of whichever interesting characters fall in their way. He writes gossip but in such a way as to make you sympathetic towards all sides. We are both protective and irritated by Holly’s antics and in either case, we find nuance in her relationships. I enjoyed the book and would suggest it for a quick twice-over. I plan on reading it again sometime over the next year.

The narrator, never identified, tells the story of his acquaintance with Holly as a flashback prompted by reminiscences with an old friend. Joe Bell, owner/operator of the bar around the corner from where our narrator and Holly occupied neighboring apartments, calls our narrator to come see something. The two convene in Joe’s bar to view a photo. One of Holly’s other neighbor’s had been a photographer and on a trip across Africa he snapped a shot of a carving. Despite the ten years since they last saw her and despite it being slightly stylized, all of Holly’s acquaintances recognize it as her spitting image. This first impression evokes adventuresses like Jane Goodall and Emilia Earhart but our second glimpse, the beginning of the flashback, brings us a very different image.

Audrey Hepburn was the perfect cast for the role of Holly Golightly. Described as slender and chic, young, with a wide mouth and perfectly arranged accessories, Holly is a young (very young: just shy of 19) woman well aware of her feminine power. It’s hard to tell whether she possesses an unusually precocious self awareness or is compensating for crippling self doubt but either way she powers through suitors and gets what she wants. We first meet her as she turns her evening’s escort down for sex. Her mastery of the situation is obvious; Holly is a master of the art of leading on. Over the course of the evening, she realized that this suitor was not worth her time. Instead of ditching him and finding her way home alone and possibly in danger, she kept her wits about her, prepared herself well, and cut him off at the last moment once she was safely behind her own door. Within moments of meeting her we know that she is what we now call a ‘sugar baby’. She spends time with older, wealthy men, sometimes having sex with them, usually not, but always getting money out of them. Capote himself said of her that she was like a modern American Geisha: entertaining gentlemen for an evening, dining and drinking on their dime, and taking their money home with her whether she chose to sleep with them or not.

In some ways I admire her. She is making the best use of her particularly compelling personality and physique in a man’s world and doing it with surety and charm. She makes friends easily but keeps herself guarded and, had she a bit more discipline, could have accomplished her goals easily. Her adventurousness and vitality inspires those she meets but her constant wanderlust prevents her from forming strong bonds, even with the family she had in the Midwest. Her brother Fred is the only lasting bond she has and his death severs what ties she had.

In other ways, she irritates me. She acts childishly, shunning the genuine care of others, spitefully spreading gossip when thwarted, petulantly manipulating herself into the fond affections of others, and lashing out with words when afraid. She makes money from leading men on, never being true to herself, and she disdains the men she lives off of. Her impulsive behavior finally creates such a tangled situation that she simply flies away, never communicating again with those who grew to love and care for her.

And in many ways, I identify with her. She is young, but old enough to prioritize. She is bright and committed when she puts her mind to something but social enough to maintain relationships all over the city. She is perceptive in many ways, naïve in some, and she fills her life with a wide variety of men. I firmly believe mine are far superior but that’s my hubris talking, haha.

This book stirred some interesting thoughts in me, many of which are still forming, though I read the book several months ago. I noticed as I wrote about Miss Golightly that I had a hard time feeling for her as a character because I kept getting angry at her as a sex worker, then upset with myself at my inability to set my work aside long enough to appreciate the story. My Twitter feed has widened and I’ve gotten to personally know some of those I follow a bit better but at the time I was writing this review, my feed was awash with angry sex workers fighting for their rights and the idea of this little strumpet getting everything (mostly) she wanted without behaving like a professional irritated me. My worldview has softened a bit and gotten more hopeful as the links and posts and little quotes are more sexwork positive, more media outlets are working with us not ‘on our behalf’ without us and as my own feelings towards the outside world improve I remember that we are all humans as much as we are sex workers. Miss Golightly has the right to conduct herself however she chooses, regardless of how I personally feel about it. The same applies to all my brothers, sisters, and Trans colleagues out there conducting themselves differently than me. However they choose to manage themselves is up to them, all you and I can do is react, the same as Holly’s friends and patrons reacted to her. Some were angry, some were sad, some were hopeful, and some were inspired. I will always strive to inspire and give hope but I cannot always be all I wish to be and in the meantime, I only hope no one judges me as harshly as I first judged Miss Holiday Golightly, Traveling.